Bob Denton: “the Panel resiled from its remit by intent”

Here are Bob Denton’s insightful remarks:

It’s now possible to analyse how the absence of any formal “truth seeking” process in the Muir Panel procedure permitted it to finesse the damning evidence of the e-mails and meander into inconclusiveness.

The first stage was for the Panel to determine that the e-mail enquiry was not really about the e-mails – it was about what the accused, in the event, achieved. The e-mails evidenced the “guilty mind” and prospective conduct of the conspirators. By moving away from the content of the emails they then suggest that the intent of the conspirators became irrelevant. This is a well recognised and rarely successful ploy. If you shoot at a man with malice and miss the consequence of your malice is mitigated, but not its criminality. The Panel, in the absence of any permitted challenge, have equated absence of success to absence of malice.

By focusing on what they actually achieved the accused are given credit for what others have done to thwart their conspiracy. There are checks and balances within the IPCC and Academic Editing processes which prevented the conspirators to a greater or lesser extent from succeeding. Matters which they excluded from the first draft, as a result of the diligence of others, appear in the second or third draft. Papers which they effectively blackball at one journal are published by another where they hold less sway. Thus the Panel give the credit due to the “have a go heroes” who prevent the crime to the criminals themselves.

The degree of their success in blackballing or devaluing competing views then becomes a matter of judgement. The Panel members give them every benefit of the doubt. Their efforts are diluted by other contributors who lack their animus, to the point where the Panel can opine that they achieved none of their objectives.

The accuseds’ degree of success can easily be read differently – there’s a fear of non-conformity with modal thought which pervades climate science, created as a result of their endeavours, which the panel doesn’t acknowledge, but which many others see as the major damage inflicted by them in the field of climate research.

It could be thought that this aberration of procedure was simply a result of a sloppy approach by panel inexperienced in conducting enquiries. However, there are strong pointers to the contrary.

By adding a lawyer to the panel they would have instantly have added a thousand years of experience to the conduct of its proceedings – Muir, perversely, eschewed this advantage from the start.

From the outset the basic rules of impartiality were abandoned. Geoffrey Bolton, who had a close personal connection with the accused, the department they worked for and the University under scrutiny was chosen as the principal inquisitor. He had no reason to seek to impeach his former colleagues and former university.

In the event, Boulton failed to ask even the most basic questions, such as: “Prof Jones, did you delete any e-mails”. It’s the sort of embarrassing question you can rely on a friend not to ask.

The Panel first failed even to attempt to obtain access to the complete email correspondence until after the originally anticipated publication date for the report. When , at last, they did make an attempt , it was perfunctory. Presumably, in the expectation that things could only get worse if they were inspected, they abandoned the attempt, citing “standard form” spurious reasons. What was initially trumpeted as being one of the main parts of the review – reading the released e-mails in their full context – did not take place., notwithstanding that the complete set of emails were available on a memory stick and could be very quickly made searchable, and searched, as was done with the original release. The panel had simply to start from the emails they had and follow the trail backward and forward. Neither a major task, nor an expensive one, nor would it take that long.

Finally, where the Panel was compelled to a conclusion, as in the case of the WMO graphic, – they found it was deceptive, no ifs, no buts, no maybes – they make no finding about Jones culpability:in a meally mouthed way they merely note that Prof Jones continues to maintain his innocence.

Given all the above I am of the view that the Panel resiled from its remit by intent rather than inadvertence, seeking nothing more from the accused than accounts which would be plausible if unchallenged.

The UEA bought in an Ad-Hoc review panel in much the same way as a lawyer buys in an expert opinion. You buy in the opinion you want.

70 Comments

For example, one of their primary defences is that the divergence problem was disclosed in the Final Version of AR4. Well, it hadnt been disclosed in AR3 or the first two drafts of AR4. And no dendros objected. The only people who objected were me (and perhaps Ross) – which they don’t acknowledge or disclose. And the written comment on divergence was done to avoid showing the divergence in the spaghetti graph.

Here’s an odd procedural aspect to the “Inquiry”. The last two meetings of the Team were on May 11 and June 25.

The June 25 meeting was attended only by Muir Russell and, surprise, surprise, Geoffrey Boulton, a staffer from BOulron’s RSE and a PR person.

In enterprises that I’ve been associated, documents have to be approved at a meeting with a quorum or through resolution signed by all parties. (Perhaps they did this but didn’t provide the documents.)

Be that as it may, there were no documented meetings of the panel after May 11 (at which time, replies to written questions to Jones and Briffa were still outstanding.)

As of the end of April, the thing was a total schmozzle. They’d had one desultory interview with CRU. It looks like Boulton wrote the sections on proxy reconstructions, IPCC etc in June, that there was never a meeting of the panel to discuss these sections. Only one other panelist even attended Jones’ interview in April. I’ll bet that Boulton’s drafts passed through the panel without barely a comment from anyone else.

The accuseds’ degree of success can easily be read differently – there’s a fear of non-conformity with modal thought which pervades climate science, created as a result of their endeavours, which the panel doesn’t acknowledge, but which many others see as the major damage inflicted by them in the field of climate research.

I agree exactly with this observation about the real and dangerous effect of the conspirators’ efforts. Indeed it is an extension of this effect and sway inside the ‘community’ of climate scientologolists that then ensued among the scientific correspondents, commentators, public and eventually politicians that has promulgated the greatest and most pernicious damage to the understanding and comprehending of the nature of any changes occurring in the climate. People got frightened of questioning anything flowing smoothly from the controlling center of “power and knowledge”.

It is clear that most involved media commentators now do feel enabled to at least raise questions, and general vigilance is increased. This is one of the greatest achievements of the release of the emails. One can only hope that this sense of caution and ability to question will persist.

This strikes me as a rather odd charge. Does a scientist have a right to get his/her paper published in the journal of first choice? Recommending that a paper be rejected in review is not a death knell, and many papers are resubmitted to other journals if they can’t get published in the journal of first choice (Nature anyone?) they are often published in lower impact journals. Seems like a rather odd complaint.

Mr Sully you have admitted you have no qualifications to make a judgement on the findings of Steve M and you certainly do not have any idea about the process of submitting papers to respected journals. I am on the editorial board of a journal. Papers should never be rejected or accepted on the basis of reviewer personal views but only on the content within the journal theme and guide lines.

I don’t think they seriously evaluated the content of the “hacked” e-mails. Just look at the following from the report:

4.3 What the E-mails Tell Us
……..
14. Finding: The extreme modes of expression used in many e-mails are characteristic of the medium. Crucially, the e-mails cannot always be relied upon as evidence of what actually occurred, nor indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional.

I think there is an element of truth to MR’s comments there [and obviously they used this as their escape hatch to find no fault in fact, but all sorts of error in unpunishable practice]

…however its application is a bit more wide-reaching than they think.
For example, therefore, any email with any emotion or incitement expressed within is not longer considered evidence of actual behavior or extreme behavior.

So…All FOIA requests must be considered professional and noble, and ‘pretty pleased with sugar ontop’…Moreover, it can now be said that no earthly nefarious action has ever materialized from blogosphere text that can be linked directly to it, because no one is considering the entire contents of the blogosphere for the penumbra of evidence.

Re #14: And never mind that the email itself is “indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional.”

I guess they were jus talkin. Of course when you tell people to delete potentially damning emails in an email, that isn’t “indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional” either.

During my working life I never once regarded any email I sent from my companies’ email servers as “private”. Some indeed may have been personal, but they belonged to my employer and therefore weren’t private. For my part the emails were indeed conversational, but many of them were also conspiratorial, and provided prima facie evidence of blocking FOIA requests, attempting to prevent papers being considered by the IPCC, threats to delete data, refusal to share data, refusal to share code and methods, requests to delete emails and attempts to oust editors who published papers the Team didn’t agree with. That prima facie evidence hasn’t been tested by any of the inquiries, except briefly by Graham Stringer who asked Jones why he’d refused to give the data to Warwick Hughes. Failure to investigate the prima facie evidence is a whitewash by any standards.

When I was given a work email address by both an American and a German company I had to sign to say I would follow their policies on email communications, this was managed by the IT dept and started about 1998. In both policies you had to agree to the archives being available for review. One of the companies was investigated under Sabanes Oxley and as soon as this started emails flew all over the place warning about deleting emails and files so no-one could say they did not know the requirements. In UAE I cannot see how they should have been much different.

I have also investigated a few workplace incidents and during the fact finding interviews there was no need for representation in fact you should only ever have one person at a time or you run the risk of colusion. Representation is needed for the hearings only.

Interesting to see Kate Moffat’s name on the list, she dealt with general enquiries to the review team. It took 5 attempts to get her to respond to some questions relating to the initial selection of the Team, in particular Boulton, and then she avoided answering the questions, just gave a load of PR spin. She’s with Luther Pendragon, a London-based communications management company.

It is clear that most involved media commentators now do feel enabled to at least raise questions, and general vigilance is increased. This is one of the greatest achievements of the release of the emails. One can only hope that this sense of caution and ability to question will persist.

I agree with this assessment completely. The die is cast, away from people accepting climate change assertions without challenge. That is not to say the public or other scientists will adopt a completely skeptical point of view. But now millions upon millions of people know that there is some question to the science, that there are others who disagree, and underneath it all, that climate change advocates have been doing “something” a bit fishy.

The Glaciergate, Pachaurigate and Amazongate scuffles have done much to augment this move toward objectivity, where before there was more or less blind acceptance. YES, “general vigilance is increased.”

I would even go so far as to say that this is THE greatest achievements of the release of the emails, not just “one of” the greatest. The problem with AGW was that AGW advocates were able to get away with claiming ANYTHING. And that included that anyone disagreeing was akin to Holocaust deniers. While we have not won a total victory, they lost their mojo and ours has increased.

Believe me, they ARE back on their heels. They have had to retreat from the battlefield in a skirmish they thought was in the bag. All these panels have only covered their retreat, not reestablished their dominance.

SOME have come over to our side, and MANY, MANY have moved to the center, willing to hear both sides of any claim. And that latter class was a tiny, tiny group before.

The battle is now engaged. A tipping point DID occur. Not one that tipped all the way to our side, but the merits (or not) of their case are now open for discussion. That is a HUGE step forward.

The panels’ remit – above everything else – was to keep the faithful from abandoning ship. Judging from reactions on pro-AGW sites, the faithful are happy as larks.

But is anyone else?

Bob and Steve: Keep at it. You have bigger audiences now than ever. Pick the panel’s report apart, and give wise counsel. Reality and real science are on your side. Time is now on your side.

And don’t forget the events in Copenhagen. Their unity fell apart. Kyoto is pretty dead. Governments backed away. And they aren’t moving back anytime soon.

Further, it is more than passing strange that a panel who is insisting that the laughable Oxburgh inquiry is actually responsible for “looking at the science”, it then turns around and repeatedly uses the excuse they could find little evidence that the conduct they were supposed to be examining had any substantial impact on the science, and thus wasn’t so bad after all.

Umm, what? How tail swallowing is that? One is tempted to yell “Third base!” after that (for you Abbott and Costello fans).

– Who’s the editor of Watt’s Up With That?
+ No, Watt’s his name.
– That’s what I’m asking you. What is the name of the editor?
+ Yes, that’s right.
– Waddaya mean that’s right? I’m asking you.
+ And I’m telling you, Watt’s the editor of Watt’s Up With That.
– Not what, who! Who’s the editor of Watt’s Up With That?
+ No, Hughes is on WarwickHughes.com

The individual submissions do not appear to be repeated. There are a couple of mentions of mine, though little became of them. One on possible money laundering ended up that the dog ate the homework. Another was the Warwick Hughes reply from Phil Jones “Why should I …” that was borrowed from Warwick to make a point about data availability, which was, however, found to be acceptable.

Although the damage inflicted on the science and the participating scientists has been considerable, much greater damage has been achieved(in my opinion) by the ineptness of the enquiries.
The opportunity for the establishment to redress the balance in the discussion was never recognised or alternatively, the stakes were to high to consider it.
In any event, the fallout from the various non- enquiries have reinforced the skeptics view that all is not as it should be.
E-mails are not like casual chats or phonecalls.There in a higher degree of premeditation in an e-mail.
To treat them as casual or spontanious expressions is missleading and not true.

I have just read Goeff Sherrington’s submission to the Muir Russell enquiry and commend it to anyone who has not yet read it.
Geoff, i may be wrong but i think i can feel your frustration here in spain.

If I may say so, the Warwick Hughes submission to Muir Russell was a fairly poorly written and fairly poorly organized and presented document. I am on his side, but I think it could certainly have made better points, or made the points better. As an affadavit type document, it seems lacking in persuasive substance. Some points are made well – the early points about the China-Australia-Russia UHI study. After that it didn’t seem to say much. It also jumped around in time in a disorganized way. The dates of the Climategate emails also should have been noted, not just the .txt file names.

Had I been on a panel receiving this submission, it would not have made much of an impression on me.

Sorry, folks, if I don’t seem to be on board on this one… it doesn’t seem to be much of anything to persuade with. And if a submission doesn’t persuade well, what is the point?

This panel had an extremely formidable task.
It was almost as difficult as finding a Tim Horton outlet in Toronto.
They succeeded in avoiding any appearance of looking for the truth and of course none was to be found.

I think that an explanation of “Tim Horton outlet” for the non-Canadian audience would be helpful. it is a doughnut and coffee shop that is a down market version of Starbuck’s and even more ubiquitous. There is even one at the Canadian army base in Afghanistan

Tim Horton’s outlets are marked by their drive through windows. It is not unusual to see a line up of cars from one of them backed up so far as to block traffic on the street. The amount of CO2 produced by cars idling in Tim Horton drive throughs is a good indicator of the genuine interest of the Canadian public in AGW. They are all for AGW abatement measures but they are not going to get out of their cars to walk into the store to buy their morning coffee.

Few remember that he was a superstar hockey player, who started a chain of donut and coffee bars, with great selections of donuts and coffee that tasted moderately better than that re-used from Ronald McDonald’s emporia. Far less sugar than in Krispy Kreme’s wares, and more recently expanded to include quick and hearty noonish chili / san / soup offerings. Seniors and the trades love ’em. No Wi-Fi yet, farazi know.

Another way of looking at it is in the context of specific intent crimes and general intent crimes. For example, in the crime of assault, the observed behavior is enough to charge the crime and get a conviction, the subjects specific subjective intent to assault is not required. However, to charge torture as well as assault under US federal code requires proving specific intent by the subject to do torture. Ditto for murder. So, in the Kangaroo review, we don’t have to consider no specific intent as evidenced by the purloined Emails. We only have to consider the general intent of the scientists doing industry standard science, their objective behavior, what ever their specific intents were as scientists are irrelevant. See? They were doing competitive consensual science! Everything else was just conversation. There is good science and bad science, but our mandate wasn’t to evaluate the consensus science!

Warwick, I think the references are to me. I borrowed sections of your early timeline from your web pages and put them in the Russell submission. See Posted Jul 11, 2010 at 2:14 AM above.

Feet2theFire. Yes, I accept your observations. I did not write in affidavit style because I was aware that there were no lawyers noted for involvement. I was more concerned with putting certain material on the record, from the original sources, which went back to early in the history of this event.

A general comment on the CRU emails – if you took any body of 10,000 emails from any major corporation, government or body operating in a complex environment, you would be able to sticky paste together a persuasive case (persuasive = “strong enough to fool many average members of the public”) of some giant conspiracy or gross misconduct. (In fact, I see exactly this happening to the company I work for right now, and as I work at the HQ, I can verify first hand what a load of rubbish it is.)

The more sobering observation I took from ClimateGate is how quickly the prominent climate change skeptics entered an almost euphoric frenzy over the whole affair. The original findings, put in perspective (a few scattered quotes, some of which were obviously ripped out of context), seemed to be relatively trivial – it’s not hard to find similar techniques or quotations in many publicly available scientific materials. In fact my first thought was – out of thousands of emails & documents hacked, was that seriously the *best* they could find!? No hundreds of emails about a giant conspiracy? No sneaky collaboration to fudge hundreds of reports? No Machiavellian strategizing about how to fool the IPCC members?

Surely climate skeptics have got better quality criticisms that this? Whatever your opinion on climate change, I’d suggest ClimateGate isn’t one of the better weapons in the skeptics’ arsenal. I can’t claim to have a strong personal opinion on climate change myself (how could I form a more educated opinion than the general consensus of the relevant experts?), but once I waded past the media sensationalism, I found ClimateGate unpersuasive.

A general comment on the CRU emails – if you took any body of 10,000 emails from any major corporation, government or body operating in a complex environment, you would be able to sticky paste together a persuasive case (persuasive = “strong enough to fool many average members of the public”) of some giant conspiracy or gross misconduct. (In fact, I see exactly this happening to the company I work for right now, and as I work at the HQ, I can verify first hand what a load of rubbish it is.)

And one can attempt to explain away obvious misconduct by using the old “taken out of context” excuse. Seems to have worked really well with you.

Most of the emails and reponses are available in their entirety so there is no “context” argument possible. This is a red herring.

The evidence is clear that the peer review process is exceedingly poor, with zero replication attempts, raw data missing, cabals that disallow publishing in major journals, IPCC lead authors promoting their own work and ignoring published but dissenting papers for the IPCC process.

Briffa believed there was a medieval warm period. Several other paleos thought that Manns work was poor and that they were “over-egging the pudding” with regards to the IPCC.

Trenberth tells us we need to find the “missing heat” rather than just saying it is natural variation. This private admission – pretty much what outsiders were already saying – has actually opened up a useful public debate.

Despite all the bluster about temperature records, the raw temperature data isn’t avaliable. The adjusted data – wrongly described bt Muir-Russel as “raw data” is still not available for replication.

all of these points were made by reputable skeptics and so they are thusly vindicated.

You are only correct hat there is no left-wing conspiracy to control the world – but then only wingnuts were arguing that was the case. There is however very good evidence of groupthink. Lokk up the definition of that and spot the symptoms.

It’s clear from the emails that the peer review process was compromised to some extent. This is a valuable observation and deserves attention.

Unfortunately ClimateGate was latched onto by some as the smoking gun evidence of the giant conspiracy they’d been hoping for.

“Most of the emails and reponses are available in their entirety so there is no “context” argument possible. This is a red herring.”

Of course the “context” argument is “possible” (whatever that means), for some of the criticisms. Examining the written context, or professional/scientific context in which some of the isolated comments occurred confirms that some are of them are essentially innocent. That those comments are still criticized by some is more indicative of their critical thinking skills, than the character of the comment maker.

“The evidence is clear that the peer review process is exceedingly poor, with zero replication attempts, raw data missing, cabals that disallow publishing in major journals, IPCC lead authors promoting their own work and ignoring published but dissenting papers for the IPCC process.

Briffa believed there was a medieval warm period. Several other paleos thought that Manns work was poor and that they were “over-egging the pudding” with regards to the IPCC.

Trenberth tells us we need to find the “missing heat” rather than just saying it is natural variation. This private admission – pretty much what outsiders were already saying – has actually opened up a useful public debate.

Despite all the bluster about temperature records, the raw temperature data isn’t avaliable. The adjusted data – wrongly described bt Muir-Russel as “raw data” is still not available for replication.

all of these points were made by reputable skeptics and so they are thusly vindicated.”

And I’m sure some of these points are valid, though by using the popular technique of stringing distant facts together and presenting them as if they somehow reflect the state of affairs as a whole, I suspect you paint a picture worse than reality.

“You are only correct hat there is no left-wing conspiracy to control the world – but then only wingnuts were arguing that was the case.”

I assume by “wingnuts” you include various prominent media figures, who I won’t dignify by naming.

My point is simply that ClimateGate wasn’t the shocking evidence of a global fraud that so many gleefully splattered it around as. There remain legitimate criticisms of climate science and scientists, but anyone whose opinion on climate change was largely influenced by ClimateGate is rather simple minded, IMO.

I mean hell, if nothing else, it’s not like the IPCC is relying exclusively on CRU for their material in the first place.

Examining the written context, or professional/scientific context in which some of the isolated comments occurred confirms that some are of them are essentially innocent.

I like it. You’ve attempted to move the thimble from ClimateGate providing strong evidence of malfeasance among some players, to:
* Some of the emails confirm that
* Some of the players
* Are mostly innocent

So what? Nobody’s claiming that all the emails prove that everyone is a bad apple!

WaterGate was not proof that the entire US government was riddled with nastiness. It only showed that a few people had done a few pretty nasty things. So too with ClimateGate.

re-
‘My point is simply that Climate wasn’t the shocking evidence of a global fraud that so many gleefully splattered it around as. There remain legitimate criticisms of climate science and scientists, but anyone whose opinion on climate change was largely influenced by Climate is rather simple minded, IMO.’

agreed & SM & others here would no doubt agree also, so what do you mean by ‘climate change’
(hotter/colder & we can somehow change or reverse whichever it is).

‘Climate wasn’t the shocking evidence of a global fraud’
is correct & SM & most commentators on CA never thought it was.

but it did verify/substantiate for long time readers & more importantly to Steve himself (think his comment was ‘unbelievable) that all off SM concerns regarding data withholding/obstruction were bourn out by the emails.

My point is simply that ClimateGate wasn’t the shocking evidence of a global fraud that so many gleefully splattered it around as.

This is very red-herring-ish. You blow off the fact that CRU and Mann were lead authors and CENTRAL to what went into the IPCC Working Groups I and II. The emails themselves DO show the great influence CRU had at the time (and seems to still be the case), as they discussed how to massage the wording so as to not send a mixed message or to water down the message. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry climatologist did not have to be involved for the conspiracy and fraud to have a huge effect on both the IPCC and public perceptions. Any manipulation by lead authors at all is – at some level – fraud. Yes, some will say it was “just politics.” But that actually reinforces the case that the SCIENCE was manipulated. When data sets are spliced end-to-end, cherry picking which went before which (instead of letting the data speak for itself) depending on the message they wanted to send, CRU at the very least fudged the reading of the data. Being central players, their influence was huge. It is disingenuous to pretend that because climatologists in every corner of the globe weren’t involved that there was not a conspiracy og global proportions. The emails include climatologists from at least CRU, the US, Australia, Europe and Asia.

There remain legitimate criticisms of climate science and scientists, but anyone whose opinion on climate change was largely influenced by ClimateGate is rather simple minded, IMO.

First of all, the vast majority of people in the world who had an opinion about global warming got their information about AGW got it through the main stream media (MSM). Most people don’t have time in their lives to dig into the details. Climategate was the first time many, many millions of people had actually heard that there was even another SIDE to global warming. Anti-CAGW points were not being disseminated by the MSM, so besides attendees of blogs like the present one, no one knew much at all about the criticisms of the alarmists, and when they even HEARD about them, it was in such derogatory and demonizing terms as “skeptics” and deniers,” used by the alarmists.

The people who had had no reason to doubt the alarmists were not simple-minded, simply because they hadn’t had time to look into the issue before they heard about the other side of the story and – when they did hear about it – woke up because of Climategate. You insult the people who, when the DID hear about the other side of the story, accepted some of it as valid and moved to a more neutral position.

The truly simple-minded people are the ones who can’t wrap their heads around the fact that data has been adjusted. Most people believe that the graphs shown to the public – in Al Gore’s movie and elsewhere – do not represent raw data, but instead are previously adjusted. Every single individual I have ever mentioned this to seems to think I am lying. These ‘simple minded’ people appear to not believe that scientists would show the world manipulated data instead of the real raw temps. They also ‘simply’ don’t believe that in doing the adjusting the scientists would lie or cheat in any way. These ‘simple minded’ people believe that the Precautionary Principle should be adhered to, even without considering the costs governments are being asked to spend or the economic impacts. The very last and weakest argument I get from these people is, “Well, what if it is true? Isn’t it better to err on the side of caution than to find out 100 years from now?” These ‘simple minded’ people go by headlines that have caught their collective eye over this subject now 20 year period, proving out the truism that if you repeat something often enough the masses will believe it is true.

And yet, SOME of them will awaken when the other side of the story is told. Some have, because of Climategate. Contrary to your assertion, people who have had their eyes opened a little bit are not simple minded BECAUSE of their being influenced by Climategate, but were simple minded BEFORE Climategate – and less so now.

Being more informed makes people less simple minded, not more so.

If I can speak for “our” side”: No one here believes that Climategate alone convinced many people that the alarmists are wrong. We DO believe that a few were swayed enough to move into our camp. We also do believe that many were moved closer to the middle ground. Part of what is going on here has to do with public perception. Most of it, though, has to do with what is perceived to be the corruption of science, for whatever reasons. (And there are many reasons suspected and asserted.) You will hear here many apoplectic voices about this corruption. Climategate for those here is a vindication of those suspicions. For the general public it is a bit of an awakening.

For the politicians it evidently an awakening, too. Copenhagen was to a large extent the death knell of Kyoto, apparently. Not all of that demise came from Climategate. However a lot of it DID. Whoever released the emails and other files evidently aimed the release for maximum impact, politically. Whoever it was could certainly not have been sure of its effects. But it was an earthquake in the politics of Kyoto, Copenhagen and the IPCC. Since Copenhagen governments are pulling back from Kyoto. Are they all ‘simple minded’ because they see something differently now?

The panels were an attempt to put the cat back in the bag.

The world isn’t so simple for climate alarmists anymore. Say what you will, but the worm has turned – enough at least that “their side” doesn’t control the dialog 100% anymore. Both sides of the story are getting out now, even if our side needs them to come here to hear our side. It is now probably 85%-15% – but that is better than 100%-0%. A tipping point of sorts has come. They Brits and Penn hoped that the panels would tip the status quo back to 100%, where they’ve had it for these last 20 years.

There is little evidence that they have been successful. It may have moved back to 88%-12%, but that isn’t really what they wanted. The true believers – the ones we here would considered ‘simple minded’ – are running around claiming the high ground, screaming that they’ve slain the demons. The rest of the world is a mixed bag – implying not so simple-minded at all. Kudos to Anthony and Steve McIntyre and the scientists on our side for fighting the good fight, and for holding on until Climategate happened, when people would have somewhere to go to read about the other side of the story.

The world is less simple minded than it was in October 2009. Facts are good things. Facts about the shenannigans being used on one side are especially good things – they have shown that scientists are also political. It is a lesson un-simple-minded people need to know.

What this all means is not that ‘there is really very little here to see, it doesn’t really mean much’, but that ‘they got caught with their finger on the scale.’ After that, what does anything else that Al Gore has to say mean after all. Anything that you say has to be filtered through ‘you got caught with your finger on the scale.’ When you say ‘the data says…’ why should, how can, I believe you. I suspect that you personnaly are a good honest scientist working to find the truth. But the fact is that an unknown number of people involved in the process are not, they are politicians for whom the output is more important than the truth. This is proven by the emails taken in context. More work rooting out these people and less effort defending the output would work to your advantage.

but once I waded past the media sensationalism, I found ClimateGate unpersuasive.

I will run with that. But I will argue the deeper arguments.

I suppose the first point would be that we in the skeptical, anti-AGW community have done exactly that ourselves, in regards to the entire AGW meme. We have – individually – “waded past the media sensationalism” (thank you for that phrase, by the way!) and found the man behind the curtain to be charlatan, with just enough facts to wrap his bomfoggery around and convince people who do not have the time or inclination to look deeper.

Many a headline written by AGW-supporting science journalists has declared great risk to us and to the planet, even though the vast majority of included quotes in those headlined articles show many caveats and less than certainty to the claims the headlines asserted. (Samples on request, if you want to wade through those…) So, even within their assertions there is waffling, yet the scientists have not to my knowledge ever corrected the overstating of the case for AGW. This argument, of course, does not in any way address the actual science or data or interpretation of such data. Interpretation is really what science is, after all – just the interpretation/understanding, and not necessarily the reality. If it were the reality, why science would never need further development or correction – and science in my own lifetime has had many a correction – all the while reality stayed the same.

The point here is that the pro-AGW assertions are being accepted with little “wading into.” I started out as one of those who did not wade into it. I started out accepting that, yes, we do seem to be putting nasty stuff into our environment. I was alive and old enough to be well aware of the degree we were polluting our air and water, here in the US. I spent much of my career working on scrubbers and oxidizers, and water treatments plants, too. So I know how much cleaner we have made our air – not just in an academic way, but in the real world. I have to say I am proud of the quality of the air in the US. Europeans should also be proud; there are no more killer fogs in London, and Europe has become a collective holiday destination, in hundreds of cities that used to be grimy with the residue of polluted skies. The same can be said for Boston and Chicago, Baltimore and St Louis, and many other US cities.

But still we are putting some nasty stuff into out water and air. So I accepted that we were likely to be affecting the atmosphere to the point that it affects the temperatures. Still, I wondered why they picked out CO2 as the mechanism for such warming as they claimed. And even if it is CO2, I wondered about the studies that they’d undertaken to rule out other causes – such as land use, or solar activity, or – as you hear much in the skeptical community – natural variability. So over 10 years ago I dived in, to see what was there.

Between you and me and the fly on the wall and whoever will listen, “but once I waded past the media sensationalism, I found [AGW] unpersuasive.”

There was no “there” there. The expected studies using the scientific method of isolating possible causes one by one to never have been undertaken. This SHOCKED me. How could they have decided human activity as the cause, if they hadn’t ruled out the other possibilities? This was not science! If they suspect human activity, that is one thing – and one as scientists they had the purview to go find out for sure. If they have EVER done this, in all my close searching I have not found it in over 10 years.

I suspect something of the same happened to most of the others in the skeptical community.

Once having discovered that the scientists hadn’t taken that necessary step, my skepticism was aroused, and I began t look closer at the MSM articles, and that is when I saw how little certainty was being voiced by the scientists being quoted – a lot of “could be,” “possibly,” “perhaps,” “we think that” comments showed up – IF one was looking for them. And of course, most of such wafflings were deep within the articles, where few readers go deep enough to find.

Such unscientific behavior made me wonder who they could be snowing the politicians and the public. Not all within the skeptical community dare these days to say so, but I actually DO suspect that the warming that everyone accepts – even HERE – as real, is not real at all. I suspect that something has been done to the numbers – some adjustment(s) being made (or not), and possibly some cherry picking of information. Early on I saw how graphs were done so that temperature ranges were chosen with the lowest possible starting temperature/date, which results in the steepest possible slope, affording the greatest amount of scare. From there – here on skeptical blogs – I found about other issues – Yamal, met station sitings, UHI under-estimating and a few more issues. I’d already known before beginning – back in the 1990s – that they’d dropped more than 75% of the reporting stations in the US from the GISS stations being used to calculate averages, at a time when it was ever more easy to include them, which made no sense, as the more stations would certainly afford more precision.

So, all in all, WE skeptics, as a whole, are the ones who are each arguing, “but once I waded past the media sensationalism, I found [AGW] unpersuasive.”

That is why we are HERE.

I would only suggest you carry your skepticism over to what the pro-AGW people are sensationalizing. After all, we can only sensationalize here, on our humble little blogs, which have little outreach capabilities. Sensationalizing, to be effective, needs to be out there in the main stream media – something we have VERY little access to. Climategate was the ONLY foot in that door we skeptics have EVER had.

I suspect most of the trepidation in the pro-AGW crowd comes from the fact that their MSM monopoly was infringed upon. Sensationalism for them is okay; sensationalism by skeptics is not okay, evidently…

But READ our blogs, once or twice a week. You will find that though many comments argue for taking no prisoners and such, most articles/posts are inclined to be scientific in large part, with links to data and or peer-reviewed papers (perhaps via other blogs).

Though Climategate allowed us one toe-hold in the MSM, we have little to no capacity to sensationalize. Please read THEIR sensationalizing with the same degree of “un-persuaded-ness.”

It is probably unavoidable that passed the media sensationalism, the reality, which as usual is not soooo simple, looks much more complex. I guess most of us here started as (passive) believers, got some questions, and looking for answers (or lack thereof) had doubt increase.

“Climategate” came just as a confirmation of those doubts, so it never appeared really important to me. It may have been the occasion to make “independent” assessments about IPCC and the science, but it was not used for this purpose. Thus the accident will remain a footnote in the history of science.

Because all the doubts are however not proof of the negative:

The science is more complex, some evidence may be questionable, and GW may not be a human-made catastrophe. But it may be a human-made catastrophe, however. I am sure those scientists are not fully dumb and they do believe it. They just apparently got blind to any counter argument so they cannot be trusted as “neutral experts”.

I for one, would love to have finally a real answer to this question – I am still agnostic for now with many doubts. And it IS a question that will impact my life and the one of my newborn son…

Just a clarification. I don’t think any of us here are “anti-AGW”. I think we are “anti secret science”. If the evidence points to AGW, then why isn’t it public and transparent? I follow CA because I want to find out.

Re: Jeff Alberts (Jul 12 19:00), Jeff, I waffle back and forth between being all-out AGW and simply saying the science isn’t settled at all.

The single thing that pushes me into anti-AGW is simply that they haven’t shown much of the raw data at all, and what IS known has some very dicey adjustments. I am not even SLIGHTLY sold on the homogenized “value-added” (Jones’ phrase) data as being legit. I can be convinced, but I will have to come at it from the direction of, “prove it to me, Dude.” They lost my vote a long time ago, and they aren’t getting it back easily.

In ONE way I AM anti-AGW, and that is anti-those-who-tell-us-it-is-a-done-thing. Especially as regards CO2. The funny thing is that if they had been pushing the LAND USE part of it, they would have much stronger case. At least with me. Land use includes UHI, and if they’d just admit that, they’d be on more solid footing. HOWEVER, since the temps at rural stations show declines or practically level, even THAT doesn’t come up a winner, because it says, “So what if the cities are warmer? The countryside is still absorbing that heat and dissipating it just fine.”

Understood. Though I don’t think you’re really anti-AGW, sounds more like you’re anti-undue-alarmism. I’ll wager you believe that humans do have an effect on at least regional climate, but the magnitude is what is under dispute.

If people still think there is not enough in the emails can they please lead us where the better criticism is? I tried to follow it in the mainstream media and only got noise or just heat. If somebody can ask his colleague to hide a decline that he had made us all believe was an increase and our government’s were prepared to sacrifice us on that but you say there is no proof then I really wonder. But who am I?

The release of the emails seems to have been done in a very disciplined way. No trail to the leaker has been found so far, and there have been no follow-up releases. The emails seemingly were timed perfectly to undermine the Copenhagen summit. They succeeded, along with other developments such as the recession. I am left wondering if the leaker has more, but is waiting for another time to release when the effect would be greatest. There is so much of this story that is yet to be written.

Also, all the talk is about the emails and almost none of it is about the code that was also released. The code is so damning. Those warmists who dismiss the emails as saying nothing about the validity of the science apparently don’t understand the admissions of fraud that are in plain sight in the code commentary.

GREAT points! I agree that there is no reason to think the emails and code released is all there is. It could even be that Jones et al did not delete more emails before the bobbies looked them because they knew that whoever did it could release more later on – and if that happened then there WOULD be proof that Jones deleted emails.

And yes, the code. I love the one where the adjustment value just steps up and up and up. If those are all in tune with relocations or TOB changes, fine, but there were an awful lot of steps.

If it’s the same code I recall seeing, it couldn’t possibly be taking into account TOBS, site changes, etc for each individual site. The code seemed to be acting on practically all the data, not hardcoded changes for specific sites.

YES, you are absolutely right. Applying those step adjustments globally in a dataset is as bogus and unscientific as you can get. Each station has different TOB changes. It’s downright lazy, and without some serious justification/explanation in the code comments (something that would pass skeptical peer reviewers), the adjustment values have NO validity whatsoever. They MUST have something sourcing the values. But applying them globally also must have some justification, and that must be commented in the code.

In my opinion, the enquiries have produced the antithesis of what they set out to achieve. I think that they have increased the interest in climategate tenfold. They have regenerated what was (to some extent) an evaporating story and raised it above its original position. The very fact that there is so little substance in the enquiries has lead the (particularly the Muir Russell enquiry) filling out of the report with obfuscated and nuanced non conclusions.
I predict that climategate will be with us for some time to come and that it has yet to bear its best fruit.

feet2thefire:
I think that deletion of emails would be damaaging evidence against Jones et al., but the emails would not be deleted from the server, only from Jones’ email account. Did he not understand when he asked Mann et al. to delete emails that this is a fool’s errand in today’s world?

@John Hekman – You know, until someone runs up against that or hears about it, they won’t know that. Ask members of the the GW Bush White House. Their millions of deleted emails were found on a server the week after Bush left office.

As Pat Michaels points out in the Wall Street Journal today:

It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia’s CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line “IPCC & FOI,” “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise.”

Mr. Jones emailed later that he had “deleted loads of emails” so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, “Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”

I don’t think I myself read the email where he said he actually HAD deleted emails. I THINK this is the first time I’ve seen assertions that he had actually gone ahead and DONE it. No wonder the man stepped down right after the files were released.

Wouldn’t we all love to see the files he deleted?

And has anyone got an idea what Amman and Wahl might have had that Jones wanted to deep six?

One more comment: Occasionally the similarities with Nixon and the Watergate situation come to mind. It wasn’t the original screw up that brought down Nixon. For well over a year there were only two guys (as we know) doing much with the Watergate story. It was on slow simmer for a really long time, just enough to eventually warrant some attention by the House. Most of the Washington press corps thought they were just a couple of outsiders wasting their time.

When the House hearings began no one expected it to lead to White House tapes, and 19-1/2 minutes of one tape recordings being erased, or John Dean talking about a “cancer in the White House.” There was more than one smoking gun, but they didn’t show up till near the end, when things spiraled completely out of control for Nixon.

All in all, it was the reactions of Nixon et al – the cover-up – that brought the whole thing down on their heads. Most of that year plus the cover-up seemed to be working.

More or less, the order of things with CRU is following approximately the same path. Two main iconoclastic outsiders keep digging. A few people in the know throw them something worth sinking their teeth into from time to time. And every now and then there is something worth a second class headline on page 3 or 7. And things are building, ever slowly. And the insiders keep taking actions that they believe will sweep it under the rug enough, and that people will then forget all about it.

So, Anthony and Steve M – Keep being Woodward and Bernstein. And every one of the Baker Street Irregulars here, keep at it, guys! The second stash of emails and docs is coming at some point. Jones and Mann are quaking in their boots about it. Now that the Climategate first round appears to be winding down, the underdogs have managed to inflict some damage. He/she who released them in November will look for the most opportune time to release the next batch. When that happens, the quaking of the CRU crew/Mann will turn to panic and every man for himself.

You know there is trouble ahead when supporters of AGW say all 3 UK inquiries and the Penn State ones were incorrect. Article is behind a paywall, but sign up for free and you get 17 free articles a month one of them can be this article.

This whole plerophory of assurance is quite without merit. The e-mails are testament to events which have taken place and the evidence of malpractice, (now in the public domain) is incontestable.
The writing is on the wall.

A: “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”
B: I don’t like your attitude. Those are lies.
A: No you just took my words out of context. Most of what I write is not like that at all.
B: Oh well that’s all right then. I was nearly simple-minded for a moment there.

Too see if you are consistent, try imagining the reverse of a situation. In this case, assume that Steve M, McKitrick , and Wegman had conspired to adjust their analyses of Mann’s work to hide the fact that the method Mann used was robust and consistent with standard statistical practices, refused to provide the data to support their contention, and had used Wegman’s reputation to prevent Mann from further publishing his work in this area and even defending his work against their criticism.

Anybody support those activities? Wouldn’t you be outraged if you were an AGW supporter? If so why would you think Climategate isn’t important? It’s just the mirror image of what I just outlined.

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